From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [298]
He hoped Warden would not forget to call her up. At the same time he dreaded the thought of Warden calling her up. A man was only human. And Warden was an attractive man. Big, and husky, and masculine, and—interesting.
Memories of what he would lose ran through his mind. Sharp, clear, personal pictures of Alma like candid camera snaps. The pictures ran through his mind like negatives flashed on a screen, ten times life size in magnification, all the most intimate details (every pore, every hair, every wrinkle, of her body that he knew as well as his own, he could suddenly visualize them all perfectly) he stood and watched the pictures. And in each picture moved the same tin blank, the same two-dimensional black silhouette, the same black seducer, standing where Prewitt had stood and sitting where Prewitt had sat and lying where Prewitt had lain, taking all of Prewitt’s most cherished secrets unto himself. The son of a bitch was using his mind and memories to seduce the woman he loved and he could not stop the black bastard. It was agony. He stood and watched the woman he loved being callously outwitted and seduced by himself. He could feel the panic he had put down that first night in the guardhouse coming back on him.
The thing was, she was too easy fooled (he felt) too generous for her own good, just let any lonely unhappy guy come along with a good snow job and she’d let him have it just to make him feel better, maybe. Take him right in. He remembered how easily she had sucked in his loneliness spiel. The fact that his had been true did not make any difference. They all were true. Nobody ever lied about being lonely. But they were all lies too, he knew from himself, because as soon as you started to talk to a woman about your loneliness you werent alone any more, you were like the playwright believing in the hero of his own play, the novelist trying to live his own novels. As soon as you saw the audience was affected you knew you had something to gain and you started to act, to make the truth more convincing. And then the truth wasnt there any more, it had got lost in the shuffle. He felt if he could only talk to her a minute, and warn her. He was terribly afraid suddenly she would not be able to see that the guys who spieled her were lying. After all, she had not seen it with him, had she? Or had she? maybe she had and that was why she kept refusing to marry him? Because she didnt trust him. But, she had to trust him! The panic was getting into him; he could hardly restrain himself from turning to stare at the chainmesh grills locked on the windows. He felt that any second he would fall down on the floor and start screaming and beating his fists on the floor. In front of these three watching him, watching so closely.
This had never happened to him before. He had gone without any for longer than three months without hurting any, plenty times. It had never bothered him in the old days on the bum and at Myer. But then he had not had any idea of what it really could be like with a woman, then. It wasn’t like this with Violet either. Suddenly, he wondered if Violet had ever felt this way about him. Maybe it was because he loved Alma? But he had thought he loved Violet. Or maybe it was because he was so sure Alma didn’t love him. You’re crazy, you must stop it, he tried to convince himself desperately, as he went right on straining his eyes to try and recognize the black silhouette, I’ll kill him, I’ll kill the evil black son of a bitch.
“What’s the matter?” the trustee grinned solicitously. “Did I say something?”
Prew felt his face grinning somewhere. Thank God! he thought. He looked around behind him at the two giants. “What?” his voice said.